A Taxonomic Study of Gardnerella vaginalis (Haemophilus vaginalis) Gardner and Dukes 1955

Abstract

Fifty-five strains received as Haemophilus vaginalis or as catalase-negative coryneform bacteria from the vagina together with 61 marker cultures were subjected to numerical phenetic analyses using 149 unit characters. The data were examined using the simple matching (SSM), Jaccard (SJ) and pattern (DP) coefficients and clustering was achieved using the average linkage algorithm. Cluster composition was not markedly affected by the coefficient used or by test error, estimated at 6 . 5%. The H. vaginalis strains formed a tight cluster which was only distantly related to representatives of the genera arthrobacter, Cellulomonas, Corynebacterium sensu stricto, Erysipelothrix, Haemophilus, Kurthia, Lactobacillus, Listeria and Propionibacterium but shared a high overall affinity to unclassified catalase-negative coryneforms which formed a discrete taxon, cluster 9. The H. vaginalis strains could be distinguished from the related strains in cluster 9 by several unrelated phenotypic characters. Using the S1 endonuclease assay, DNA-DNA hybridizations were performed with representative strains from the numerical as well as with reference strains of Bifidobacterium and Actinomyces. Haemophilus vaginalis was found to be a genotypically legitimate group and its DNA showed little homology with DNA from the marker strains tested. The DNA base composition of H. vaginalis was 42 to 44 mol % guanine plus cytosine. A new genus should be created to incorporate strains known as H. vaginalis or Corynebacterium vaginale. The name Gardnerella vaginalis proposed by Greenwood & Pickett (1979) is supported.

The identification of Gardnerella vaginalis

“…It has been suggested that the ability of G. vaginalis to produce diffuse P-haemolysis on human-but not horse-blood agar can be used to give a presumptive identification (Greenwood et al, 1977;Bailey et al, 1979;Wells and Goei, 1981). However, it appears that other bacteria frequently isolated from the female genital tract may occasionally produce similar haemolysis (Smith, 1979;Piot et al, 1980). Two study groups have suggested that the sensitivity of G. vaginalis to high concentrations of metronidazole, which is unusual in facultatively anaerobic bacteria, may aid a rapid presumptive identification (Smith and Dunkelberg, 1977;Bailey et al, 1979).…”

“…The formation of a new genus, Gardnerella, for all organisms previously designated Haemophilus vaginalis or Corynebacterium vaginale, was proposed by Greenwood and Pickett and supported by Piot and his colleagues, who also performed a detailed taxonomic study on a collection of G . vaginalis strains and related organisms (Greenwood and Pickett, 1979;Piot et al, 1980).…”

“…The reaction to Gram's stain is variable so that even this basic tool for identification is of little help. Carbohydrate-fermentation tests often pose problems of reproducibility (Edmunds, 1962;Dunkelberg, Skaggs and Kellogg, 1970;Bailey, Voss and Smith, 1979;Greenwood and Pickett, 1979;Piot et al, 1980), and although glucose, maltose and starch are almost invariably fermented (Dunkelberg, 1977), this is of little use for identification purposes as these carbohydrates are also fermented by a wide variety of other bacteria (Piot et al, 1980). It has been suggested that the ability of G. vaginalis to produce diffuse P-haemolysis on human-but not horse-blood agar can be used to give a presumptive identification (Greenwood et al, 1977;Bailey et al, 1979;Wells and Goei, 1981).…”

Characterization of Actinomyces turicensis and Actinomyces radingae strains from human clinical samples

“…A detailed overview was given recently by Funke et al (1997). Bacteria resembling G. vuginalis and various Actinomyces and Arcanobacterium species have been isolated as pure cultures or from mixed cultures in a wide range of infections in humans (Brander & JosimiesSomer, 1992;Piot et al, 1980;Van Esbroeck et al, 1996;Wust et al, 1993Wust et al, , 1995. In the present study, we used whole-cell protein electrophoresis to compare and group representative strains of taxa tentatively named G. vaginalis-like (Piot et al, 1980), Actinomyces rneyeri-like (Brander & Josimies-Somer, 1992), Actinomyces pyogenes-like (Wust et al, 1993) [Actinomyces Actinomyces turicensis CCUG 32765A (' C. cervicis') Aciinomyces viscosus CCUG 14476T Arcanobacterium bernardiae CCUG 33419T Arcanobacterium pyogenes CCUG 1 3230T Preparation of whole-cell protein extracts, PAGE, densitometric analysis, normalization and interpolation of the protein profiles, and numerical analysis were performed as described by Pot et al (1994) using the GelCompar 4.0 software package (Applied Maths).…”

Phylogenetic Analysis of the Genus Bifidobacterium and Related Genera Based on 16S rDNA Sequences

“…The 16S rDNA sequences of all of species of Bifidobacterium, in contrast, have not yet been analyzed, and have also been incorrectly registered in the database (9). In addition, Gardnerella vaginalis was a close relative of the genus Bifidobacterium by 16S rRNA gene sequence similarity (21) and biochemical characteristics (11).…”